ZUCK IS TAKING DOWN THE AD INDUSTRY — PART DEUX
If you have not passed your erudite eyes over Part 1, please feel free to do so.
The quick take is that Big Tech (GOOG, MSFT, META, AMZN) will all roll out what Meta is calling “Infinite Ads” (the name alone already exposes an achilles heel, upon which I will elaborate shortly). According to Zuck, his flavor of this wonder tech will empower businesses to hook up their bank account, and watch the lucre flow in.
It makes sense. If we look at this through the WWHWW phases of advertising, it becomes clear:
WHO - Targeting
Targeting is first and foremost about affinity. Who has affinity with the product?
• Ask a research agency like Kantar and they will spend weeks asking people questions. The results may or may not be true, valid, or useful. They will charge you hundreds of thousands for this speculation.
• Meta has access to the daily habits of billions of people, which all goes to train their AI. This machine knows more about these people than they know about themselves (a tidbit that was proved a decade ago by the dataset that resulted in Cambridge Analytica). They will very likely give “insights” away for free. That is, if you even want them. Given these insights will simply power the machine to make you rich, as long as the algo is pumping cash into your bank account, who gives a shit?
WHAT - Insights
This is WHAT we say to the WHO. It’s an insights-powered brief for the humans or machines that will be conjuring up the creative messaging.
• Once again, Kantar, Ipsos, or other company that will ask humans questions they cannot truthfully answer (read: conscious mind). Then for an additional fee, they will graciously “guide” the process in which marketing people bandy about opinions about what they think all this means.
• Meta’s mega machine will derive behavior-based probabilities, skip biased human opinions, and again, very likely offer a view into your customer set for free. Further, the machine will tailor each message to the individual user. Hence the name “Infinite Ads.”
HOW - Creative
HOW do you say the WHAT to the WHO.
• Agency creatives (I used to be one) will graciously receive Kantar’s report and take one of the following actions:
• Read it just enough to be able to say that their idea connects to the “research.”
• Pitch it out sans a cursory glance, knowing that their own creative genius cannot be augmented by that or anything else.
• Meta’s AI will, presumably, base all AI-generated creative assets on templates/objects provided by the brand, then work within those guardrails to tailor messaging to each individual. Meta has trillions of datapoints upon which to base this messaging, each of which elevates the probability of the consumer acting on it. The machine may not know why this is, but the math is there all the same. Not even Monks and their HAL 9000 can even hope to compete with this.
WHERE - Media planning
• Agencies: opinions abound. They will also mess with the targeting algos on the big platforms, thinking they know better. I elucidated Zuck’s opinion of this in Part 1.
• Meta: their AI will know where to serve ads better than you, and are claiming to put their money where their mouths are, as the new model will be remunerated via commissions on sales. And, ref: aforementioned trillions of datapoints.
WHEN - media buying
• Agencies: advantage here as they can buy anywhere.
• Meta: they will only serve ads within their own ecosystem.
All of this based on performance. Remember when Publicis announced they will work on a performance basis? Neither do most other people. Here today, gone later today. But Meta has stated they will, which will set a precedent forcing the other platforms to follow suit. The writing is on the wall for the ad industry.
“THEY DON’T KNOW BRAND! WHAT ABOUT THE BRAND?!”
Meta/Zuck have done some egregiously stupid shit over the years. And I am not a fanboy by any measure. However, the “brand” issue, the most easily accessible, top-of-mind, obvious answer that every agency CEO in The Verge article seemed to land on, is in actuality not an issue at all. It’s no surprise that, when threatened, marketers will envision an AI-run-wild, conjuring up six-fingered, three-eyed monster people with distorted horror movie smiles, holding a Coke with a misshapen logo.
Let us remember in Part 1, the discussion about the existing AI-based creative generators. They are viable businesses and they wouldn’t be if their product was unusable. This means the AI has boundaries within which it must operate. It means that it is not only possible to create these boundaries, but also advisable to do so. That, in essence, is what branding is: defining an identity, meaning, an understanding of the product/company. Our own platform has these boundaries built in.
The agency respondents to Zuck’s assertion that they are now Audi 5000 requires that we have the “brand” conversation. Up to now, it has been an ethereal concept that has spawned a little Ultraman-like family of brand-related concepts: brand equity, brand architecture, brand purpose, brand values, brand salience, brand loyalty, brand health, brand safety…I could go on. But what is it, really — no metaphors, no analogies, tropes, allegories, or parables?
DAVID AAKER’S BRAND
The modern father of the brand said, “brands live in the hearts and minds of consumers.”
Post this on LinkedIn and you’ll get loads of “Yes!” and “This!” from Le Gallerie du Peanut. However, it does not say what a brand is, only where it (ostensibly) lives. The heart is a metaphor for emotion, and the “mind,” is a metaphor for memory. Given emotions are assembled in real time and have no distinct brain circuits, there really is only the brain, it’s memories and perception.
Perception.
Dr. CD’s “BRAND”
My definition: the cumulative cognitive patterns that form in the brain via the perception of your company, product, or message.
In other words, the perception of all that you are putting out there, as filtered through the cognition of any given brain. The important questions to ask, then, are:
⁃ What is the cognitive variance across my consumer base? (How differently are they perceiving?)
⁃ How does this cognitive variance affect perception?
The probability that any two people perceive the color red the same is zero.
Remember this dress?
White and gold? Or black and blue?
This blew up the internet.
How we perceive the world is different, one person to the next. Cognitive traits are part of the subconscious brain. Jonathan Haidt refers to the subconscious as the “elephant,” and the conscious brain as the “rider.” The rider is only 5% of your cognition. Consumer research agencies, and most of the ad industry, deal only with the rider, and believe “that’s all there is.” Like someone 10,000 years ago thinking that earth is the only body that exists in the universe.
The party is where the elephant is. Decisions are non-conscious processes. Emotions are assembled based on non-conscious processes. Yet, consumer research agencies are asking the riders why they think they bought xyz product, when it was entirely the prerogative of the elephant.
Given this:
• Any research company that claims “deep insights” is not being truthful.
• Any agency of any kind that tells you one message will “work” is shooting from the hip with your money.
• Branding is a function of working with the perceptions of groups of audience.
• In order to work with these perceptions, you need to know the cognitive traits of your consumers.
• These traits are the only insights that qualify as “deep.” Nothing else is a “deep insight.” That’s false advertising.
Branding is someone perceiving a message or product and reflexively, and non-consciously landing on “Hmm, that’s me. Just feels that way. Dunno why, but it is.” You have been in this situation so many times:
“Which do you like?”
“I like that one.”
“Why?”
“Dunno, just do.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
MACHINE BRANDING
Zuckerberg’s machine cannot do what ax3 does (ax3 is the platform my team created, one that reads the cognitive traits of your audience and serves you up a blueprint on how to engineering cognitively resonant comms). However, given the trillions of datapoints, Zuck’s AI likely has the probability calculations tuned pretty well, and can therefore serve an AI-generated ad to someone in a resonant way, just based on best-guess. Again, it won’t know why it works, but the probability calculations will guide it to decent approximation.
Therefore, if an ad is served in such a way that it works with the perceptions of a given individual, prompting action, resulting in conversion, and revenue for both the merchant and the Zuckquilizer, branding has taken place.
All the Gen2 purists are flapping their arms right now saying that this is “activation.” No, people. This scenario contains no sales, no coupons, no cajoling, the merits of the resonance just made the sale. Come on up here and join us on the Gen3 platform, the view is so much better.